"Man convicted of molesting a dead deer and shooting horse to have sex with it 'assaulted female cop after shoplifting from Walmart.'"

Now, there's a headline! And it happened in Wisconsin. In the aptly named city of Superior.

"Obama is positioning himself as a protector of the working class, even as blue-collar whites are showing historically low support for him."

"Likewise, [Elizabeth] Warren’s rhetoric appealing to the working class resonates predominantly with some of the wealthiest liberal Americans, who have donated generously to her campaign. But it’s been a challenge for her to connect with many of the average Joes, in part because her background as an academic and government official. Unlike Romney, [Scott] Brown has a well-worn reputation for connecting with those folks."

And yet Warren has been chosen to give a high-profile speech at the Democratic Convention.

Perhaps Romney will be a much easier foil than Brown on the convention stage. Democrats are confident about using the convention to cast Romney as an out-of-touch plutocrat and believe Warren’s background advocating for consumers in her brief role with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau makes her an ideal prosecutor. In a best-case scenario for Democrats, Warren could emerge as a hit among the “Walmart moms,” that oft-cited swing demographic who could play a decisive role in a close election. Several Democratic operatives pointed out that the speech will coincide with the NFL season opener, making it likely the audience would be more female and more in Warren's sweet spot.

Walmart moms... don't they watch NFL games now? Last I looked, 55% of women were watching (and 73% of men).

In any case, I suppose that to appeal to women, the convention needs some prominent women speakers — especially if they're going to feature Bill Clinton, which they are. Clinton needs to be vouched for by a woman.

Why does the NYT have a 4000-word article about Apple Store workers only making $11.25 an hour?

"By the standards of retailing, Apple offers above average pay — well above the minimum wage of $7.25 and better than the Gap, though slightly less than Lululemon, the yoga and athletic apparel chain, where sales staff earn about $12 an hour."

So what's the problem? What's the issue? Why is this a story? The presumption seems to be that because Apple makes so much money, it ought to redistribute more of it to the people who happen to work in the stores. But why?

Much of the debate about American unemployment has focused on why companies have moved factories overseas, but only 8 percent of the American work force is in manufacturing, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Job growth has for decades been led by service-related work, and any recovery with real legs, labor experts say, will be powered and sustained by this segment of the economy.

And as the service sector has grown, the definition of a career has been reframed for millions of American workers.

“In the service sector, companies provide a little bit of training and hope their employees leave after a few years,” says Arne L. Kalleberg, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina. “Especially now, given the number of college kids willing to work for low wages.”

Are you seeing the issue? There's some idea that these college-kid jobs need to be turned into careers... because... people need careers?

“It’s interesting to ask why we find it offensive that Wal-Mart pays a single mother $9 an hour, but we don’t find it offensive that Apple pays a young man $12 an hour,” [said Paul Osterman, a professor at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management]. “For each company, the logic is the same — there is a line of people eager to take the job. In effect, we’re saying that our value judgments depend on the circumstances of the employee, not just supply and demand of the labor market.”

It's interesting that we're not offended by even more things. That's assuming that you were already offended that sales workers at Wal-Mart only get $9 an hour. But why is that offensive? I don't get Osterman at all. He's trying to shift us from thinking about which people we have empathy for to which companies we feel hostility toward.

When a bicyclist shouts "to your left" — it's dangerously ambiguous.

In Arlington, Virginia, a man yelled "to your left," causing an 80-year-old woman, Ita Lapina, to step to her left. She was struck and killed.

Around here, they shout "on your left," not "to your left," but I'm not sure that clearly avoids the ambiguity. Basically, shouting at a pedestrian from behind is startling.

Bikers, think of Ita Lapina, and get a bell. People instantly understand what it means, and they don't have the confusing experience of suddenly finding someone yelling at them. Quite aside from the safety issue, it's irritating to be yelled at. I bike on bike trails often, and I know exactly what's happening when I hear "on your left," but on a sub-rational level it feels rude.

Also, when you're passing a pedestrian — especially an older person or a child — go slowly and give them a really wide berth.

ADDED: In the comments at the link, someone says: "I'd have no problem with banning full suspension bikes from multi use paths. Not because they're fast, but because cheap ones have handling issues and are too often ridden by poor cyclists." I don't know anything about whether that's true, but I see in the article that the bike was a Next Powerclimber. That bike costs $88 at WalMart. That's amazing. They'll even ship it free at that price.

"Of all the things Walmart is best known for (low prices, litigation, the demise of mom-and-pop stores), an overnight stopping place for RVers is not among them."

It's not? I think it is. That sentence is from a (long!) NYT article about renting an RV and driving all over the western United States.

Somehow litigation is a stronger association with Walmart. Who knew? And I'm a lawyer. I mean, I know Walmart has been sued. (There was that unsuccessful effort to make a class action out of the lack of advancement of female employees.)

Speaking of law, how can you write a huge NYT article about RV vacationing in the U.S. and not mention Clarence Thomas? Here's an article to make up for the gap:

"We've been in dozens of Walmart parking lots across the country," said Mrs. Thomas. "Actually it's one of our favorite things to do if we're not having to plug in and we've got enough electricity ... but you can get a little shopping in, see a part of real America -- it's fun."

When Justice Thomas is recognized, "it sort of puts a damper on things... It's not that there's anything bad... What actually happens is we kind of get mobbed. We had to leave one site that, they got so friendly... they looked forward to seeing us every year that there'd be 20 - 30 people waiting for him to come out of the bus, so we just had to move on."

She says the tough economy isn't going to stop a lot of campers, "Campers are very resilient... if gas goes up, or the cost of camping changes, or if it's difficult to fit it in, they're going to find a way to vacation. There's a whole range of campers -- from tents to pop-ups to fifth wheelers... they're people who love their family, they love the simple life, they love to get away but not spend a whole lot of money ... it's the best of America out here."

Man at Walmart — buying mulch for his marijuana plants — is bitten by a rattlesnake.

BBC reports:

Mica Craig... said the serpent attacked as he reached down to brush away what he thought was a stick from a bag of mulch.

The purchase was intended for his marijuana plants, which Mr Craig said he was licensed to grow for medical reasons.

The Wal-Mart case was decided unanimously, but it was 5-4 in a very important way.

Permit me to explain what is a bit complicated. Under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23, which governs class action, there is a set of preliminary requirements in subsection (a) and then a list of 3 types of class actions in subsection (b). The class must meet all the requirements in (a) and then fit one of the categories in (b).  The Scalia opinion (joined by the Chief Justice and Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito) and the Ginsburg opinion (joined by Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan)  agree that the district court erred in putting the class into the second category in subsection (b), but only the Scalia majority also thought a preliminary requirement in 23(a) was not met. Since all class actions — in any of the (b) categories — must meet the requirements in (a), the Scalia opinion has a much more restrictive effect on class actions.

Let's focus on that disagreement. The proposed class included all current and former female employees of Wal-Mart, well over a million women. Rule 23(a) requires that all the members of the class share a common question of law or fact. Wal-Mart had a policy of decentralizing employment decisions to the store level, and the plaintiffs, attempting to satisfy 23(a), said that Wal-Mart has "a strong and uniform 'corporate culture' [that] permits bias against women to infect, perhaps subconsciously, the discretionary decisionmaking of each one of Wal-Mart’s thousands of managers — thereby making every woman at the company the victim of one common discriminatory practice."

Is this policy of decentralizing decisionmaking a common question? Scalia called it "a policy against having uniform employment practices." There have been cases in which an "undisciplined system of subjective decisionmaking" has been held to violate Title VII (the federal statutory law about employment discrimination). But in the case of Wal-Mart, once the decisionmaking was decentralized to the store level, there would be differences from store to store in how that decisionmaking would be done. Even assuming there was an undisciplined system of subjective decisionmaking in every store, each  store would might have its own undisciplined system of subjective decisionmaking. To meet the Rule 23(a) requirement of a common question, Scalia wrote, there would need to be a "specific employment practice" that was applied to all the members of the class, not simply a policy that created the conditions for thousands of stores to devise specific employment practices. 

Ginsburg thought that Wal-Mart's delegation of discretion, "uncontrolled by formal standards, has long been known to have the potential to produce disparate effects."

Managers, like all humankind, may be prey to biases of which they are unaware. The risk of discrimination is heightened when those managers are predominantly of one sex, and are steeped in a corporate culture that perpetuates gender stereotypes."...

Ginsburg tried to portray Scalia as importing a requirement that the common questions predominate over the individual questions. (That actually is a requirement in one of the subsection (b) categories.) But that's not what Scalia did. Scalia said that the decentralization move simply wasn't a question in the case and that the actual questions are specific to the store level and not to the entire class the plaintiffs attempted to define.

ADDED: After reading the case and trying to explain it as clearly as I could, I've been reading some of the press accounts, and... I can't say I'm surprised, but what politicized drivel!

"The Supreme Court on Monday blocked a massive sex discrimination lawsuit against Wal-Mart on behalf of women who work there."

WaPo reports:

The court ruled unanimously that the lawsuit against Wal-Mart Stores Inc. cannot proceed as a class action, reversing a decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. The lawsuit could have involved up to 1.6 million women, with Wal-Mart facing potentially billions of dollars in damages....

The justices divided 5-4 on another aspect of the ruling that could make it much harder to mount similar class-action discrimination lawsuits against large employers.

Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion for the court’s conservative majority said there needs to be common elements tying together “literally millions of employment decisions at once.”

But Scalia said that in the lawsuit against the nation’s largest private employer, “That is entirely absent here.”

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the court’s four liberal justices, said there was more than enough uniting the claims. “Wal-Mart’s delegation of discretion over pay and promotions is a policy uniform throughout all stores,” Ginsburg said.

I hope the GOP candidates for President are smart and articulate enough to use this case in their argument against electing the Democratic President to a second term.

ADDED: After the oral argument, back in March, I wrote:

I think plaintiffs are trying to say that if headquarters can see a pattern of women doing poorly under the decentralized discretion system, then keeping that system in place is a discriminatory policy. That absence of centralized control is the common issue that makes it an appropriate class action (rather than lot of individual cases that ought to be brought separately if at all).

So... the thing that makes a million individuals the same is that they... are different. They should have been made the same.... or more alike... by a sex-discrimination-conscious policy. I think it's possible to get your head around that idea, but nearly impossible to picture workable legal doctrine governing the real-world affairs of human beings... including the judges who would apply it.

ALSO: I'm reading Justice Scalia's assessment of the "social framework" analysis that the plaintiffs offered to prove that Wal-Mart had "a general policy of discrimination" (which was supposed to be the common question supporting the class action form of litigation):

[Dr. William] Bielby testified that Wal-Mart has a “strong corporate culture,” that makes it “ ‘vulnerable’ ” to “gender bias.” Id., at 152. He could not, however, “determine with any specificity how regularly stereotypes play a meaningful role in employment decisions at Wal-Mart. At his deposition … Dr. Bielby conceded that he could not calculate whether 0.5 percent or 95 percent of the employment decisions at Wal-Mart might be determined by stereotyped thinking.” 222 F. R. D. 189, 192 (ND Cal. 2004)....“[W]hether 0.5 percent or 95 percent of the employment decisions at Wal-Mart might be determined by stereotyped thinking” is the essential question on which respondents’ theory of commonality depends. If Bielby admittedly has no answer to that question, we can safely disregard what he has to say.

AND: I've written a new post to help you understand the way in which this was not a unanimous decision.

The policy that is no policy... the problem of the sex discrimination action again Wal-Mart.

Lyle Denniston homes in on the plaintiffs' problem, as it emerged at oral argument in the Supreme Court yesterday:

[Justice Anthony] Kennedy said, “It’s hard for me to see…Your complaint faces in two directions. Number one, you said this is a culture where Arkansas knows, the headquarters knows, everything that’s going on. Then in the next breath, you say, well, now these supervisors have too much discretion. It seems to me there’s an inconsistency there, and I’m just not sure what the unlawful policy is.”

[The female employees’ lawyer, Joseph M.] Sellers chose in reply to dwell on the breadth of the store managers’ discretion, saying “There’s no guidance whatsoever about how to make those decisions.” The discretion, he added, is then used within “a very strong corporate culture” that leads managers to be “informed by the values the company provides.” The response itself seemed contradictory: if there was “no guidance whatsoever,” how were the managers led to apply company “values”?

I think plaintiffs are trying to say that if headquarters can see a pattern of women doing poorly under the decentralized discretion system, then keeping that system in place is a discriminatory policy. That absence of centralized control is the common issue that makes it an appropriate class action (rather than lot of individual cases that ought to be brought separately if at all).

So... the thing that makes a million individuals the same is that they... are different. They should have been made the same.... or more alike... by a sex-discrimination-conscious policy. I think it's possible to get your head around that idea, but nearly impossible to picture workable legal doctrine governing the real-world affairs of human beings... including the judges who would apply it.

A racial incident in Milwaukee.

Involving a 100-year-old woman who was working as a Wal-Mart greeter and used the provocative epithet "you people."

The Supreme Court will decide if Wal-Mart can be sued by a class of 500,000 female employees claiming discrimination.

SCOTUSblog reports on Wal-Mart Stores v. Dukes:

The first question will be whether, under Federal court Rule 23, a lawsuit may seek a money verdict — in this case, a claim for back pay — when the class was created under a provision that limits remedies to corrective court orders, not money.   Besides agreeing to hear that, the Court told the parties to file briefs and prepare to argue on a second question — whether the class was a proper one, under Rule 23, when it was cleared to go forward under Rule 23(b)(2)....

Wal-Mart’s petition had raised a second question that embraced the broader argument that no class should have been approved at all, since the claims made by the women employees were so disparate and so diffuse that they really had nothing in common, and that, as a result, Wal-Mart would not have been able to mount a defense to such claims....

The class approved in this case is the largest ever certified in a job bias context, but is also among the largest of any class certified in any case in federal courts....

The sex discrimination class-action case against Wal-Mart was actually started more than nine years ago as a race bias case involving a single company employee — Betty Dukes, a black woman who is a “greeter” at the company’s store in Pittsburg, Calif.  It later became a class-action lawsuit with six original plaintiffs, including Dukes, contending that the company has engaged in pay and promotion discrimination against women throughout the chain.

MORE: Adam Liptak and Steven Greenhouse have this:

Wal-Mart, which says its policies expressly bar discrimination and promote diversity, said the plaintiffs, who worked in 3,400 stores in 170 job classifications, cannot possibly have enough in common to make class-action treatment appropriate. “We are pleased that the Supreme Court has granted review in this important case,” Wal-Mart said in a brief statement. “The current confusion in class-action law is harmful for everyone — employers, employees, businesses of all types and sizes and the civil justice system. These are exceedingly important issues that reach far beyond this particular case.”...

Brad Seligman, the main lawyer for the plaintiffs, said Monday that plaintiffs welcomed the court’s review of the limited issue and were confident that the justices would rule in their favor. “Wal-Mart has thrown up an extraordinarily broad number of issues, many of which, if the court seriously entertained, could very severely undermine many civil rights class actions,” Mr. Seligman said.

The decision in the 9th Circuit was written by Judge Michael Daly Hawkins — who, incidentally, is one of the judges in the Prop 8 case. (I spent what seems like the entire day listening to the oral argument in that case.)

[W]riting for the majority, [Hawkins] said the company’s policies and treatment of women were similar enough that a single lawsuit was both efficient and appropriate....

[Dissenting, Chief Judge Alex Kozinski wrote:] “Maybe there’d be no difference between 500 employees and 500,000 employees if they all had similar jobs, worked at the same half-billion square foot store and were supervised by the same managers”....

“They have little in common but their sex and this lawsuit,” Judge Kozinski concluded.

"If you've ever wanted to explore the world of Wal-Mart but don't live near one, this site is for you."

"Everyone at these stores seems to be topless, pantsless, toothless or all of the above."

HuffPo sniffs (in a piece about various websites HuffPo readers might want to stoop to read).

"We have been in dozens of Wal-Mart parking lots throughout the country, actually it’s one of our favorite things to do..."

"... if we’re not having to plug in and we’ve got enough electricity and all that. But you can get a little shopping in, see part of real America. It’s fun!"

Clarence Thomas's wife talks about traveling around America in an RV with her husband, whom most people don't recognize. They drive a 40-foot Prevost bus, customized by Marathon Coaches, which looks damned glamorous.

"Jdimytai Damour.... thrown back onto the black linoleum tiles and trampled in the stampede..."

Shopping frenzy and death. At Walmart.

ADDED: I wonder if it's true that Damour was literally trampled. Did people really walk on him and brutally crush or smother him? Or did he simply fall over in the push and then die perhaps of a heart attack?

Zogby has McCain/Palin pulling ahead and men, not women, favoring Palin; and I offer a poll about that.

It's 49.7% to 45.9% for September 5-6. It was 47.1% (McCain/Palin) to 44.6% (Obama/Biden) for August 29-30.

I'm surprised how few voters are undecided (or for someone other the major party candidates): only 4.4%. But maybe people are shiftable, and claiming to be undecided just isn't as cool as it used to be. Maybe I should stop doing it! Ha ha. But I am undecided. I insist that the candidates woo me until the bitter end.

Now, an interesting thing is that the August 29-30 poll showed 8.3% undecided, which means that the conventions (or whatever else may have happened in the last few days) pushed 3.9% to take a position. If we were to assume that the change in the numbers represented only people moving out of the "others/not sure" category, then 2.6% went to McCain/Palin, and 1.3% went to Obama/Biden.

Another interesting thing is that the polls come out different if you ask the question using only the names of the presidential candidates, with McCain at 48.8% and Obama at 45.7% (and "others/not sure" at 5.5%). So it seems that Palin helps McCain much more than Biden helps Obama.

Zogby analyzes:

Clearly, Palin is helping the McCain ticket. She has high favorability numbers, and has unified the Republican Party. The striking thing here in this poll is that McCain has pulled ahead among Catholics by double-digits. On the other hand, Palin is not helping with likely voting women who are not aligned with either political party. The undecided independent women voters decreased this week from 15% to 7%, but those women went to Obama. Palin is also helping among men, conservatives, notably with suburban and rural voters, and with frequent Wal-Mart shoppers, who tend to be "values" voters who like a good value for their money.

Fascinating. It's the men who are going for Palin and women aren't buying it? Can we still accuse men of sexism -- if they're fine with women candidates, even excited about them, so long as they support traditional family values? Meanwhile, the women voters stay put and are not swayed by the mere sex of the candidate. I'm trying to speculate about which sex does better at analyzing the candidates without taking gender into account. You could say it's the women, because Palin didn't move them, but they may be taking Palin's sex into account and rejecting her because she isn't hewing to the usual women's rights issues or because they are discriminating against her because of sex. And you could say the men are being gender-neutral and what they like about Palin is not her sex but her good, old-fashioned conservatism.

Assuming it's true that it's men, not women, who are enthusiastically embracing Sarah Palin, why is it?
	Men love her womanly charms, and women are discriminating against her because of her sex.
	Men love her womanly charms, and women soberly judge her to be too conservative.
	Women are discriminating against her, and men soberly approve of her impressive conservatism.
	Both men and women are thinking rationally, but men are more conservative.
pollcode.com free polls

"Hillary Clinton proposed a $70 economic stimulus package today that would help...."

Whoooa! Just a damned minute! 70 dollars! Take pity on the taxpayer, you crazy tax-and-spend Democrat!

IN THE COMMENTS: I say:

Maybe it's like the butterfly effect. If you took $70 and spent it exactly the right way, it really would stimulate the economy. You just have to be really creative. Think about it. You have $70. How will you jump start the economy?

Blake says:

$70 to "jump-start" a trillion dollar economy.

If it were a little more, say, $7000, I could take some talking heads to a really nice lunch and change their minds.

But with $70 I'd open a cheap website (jumpstarttheeconomy.com) and encourage everyone to send me one dollar, which I would then spend on lottery tickets.

No...uh...I'd set up a pyramid. People like pyramid schemes, that's why MLMs and Social Security are so popular. I'd have plenty of money in no time, and so would the first two people under me who signed up.

An Edjamikated Redneck said:

70 bucks, huh?

I'd spend it at Walmart on books by conservative authors.

Walmart makes a few bucks and can hire another American, reducing both the unemployment figures AND reducing the roles of the uninsured by a family.

The conservative authors make a few bucks, and best of all, their books move a few points up the NYT bestseller list.

This is where I get the best bang for my $70; faced with multiple conservative writers in the top ten, the NYT has a conniption in the editorial pages and has to hire more editorialists, printers, distributors, buy more paper and presses, all stimulating the economy to well over my $70.

"Class war is forbidden in the Republican playbook."

"But Huckabee, despite an inept last week of campaigning, has forced the Republican party to face the Wal-Mart shoppers that they have long taken advantage of. He’s here. He’s Gomer. And he’s not going away."

Writes Timothy Egan.

"What we do is try to inject a brief moment of wonder that helps wake them up from that rushed stupor. That’s the true holiday spirit, isn’t it?"

Shopdropping = planting some item of yours in with a store's merchandise.

Anti-consumerist artists slip replica products packaged with political messages onto shelves while religious proselytizers insert pamphlets between the pages of gay-and-lesbian readings at book stores.

Self-published authors sneak their works into the “new releases” section, while personal trainers put their business cards into weight-loss books, and aspiring professional photographers make homemade cards — their Web site address included, of course — and covertly plant them into stationery-store racks.

Does it amuse you? Do you admire the shopdroppers? Or are they more like vandals?

This week an arts group in Oakland, the Center for Tactical Magic, began shopdropping neatly folded stacks of homemade T-shirts into Wal-Mart and Target stores in the San Francisco Bay Area. The shirts feature radical images and slogans like one with the faces of Karl Marx, Che Guevara and Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian anarchist. It says, “Peace on Earth. After we overthrow capitalism.”

"I really, honestly, believe that the more creative you are, the more likely you are to be a liberal."

So says Charles E. Sellier Jr. And he's not doing that thing where you think that the people who agree with you are finer, better, truer, more beautiful, more talented, more all-around wonderful than those slimy rats who don't. He's a righty director.

What [three right-leaning filmmakers] acknowledge... is that something besides liberal bias is responsible for the striking shortage of conservative nonfiction cinema at a time when filmmakers on the other end of the spectrum are flooding screens with messages about global warming, the war in Iraq and the downside of Wal-Mart.

If it were a left-wing agenda, it wouldn't be traceable to the studios. They don't deal in documentaries. It could be the film festival programmers. But left-wing politics might be inherent in the nature of filmmaking. Here, the theory is that "the very nature of conservatism runs counter to the rebellious impulses that make a good film... that a critique like Robert Greenwald’s 'Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price' is inherently more exciting than a defense like Ron Galloway’s 'Why Wal-Mart Works.'"

“The origin of the word conservative is about not changing, accepting what is,” said the director Wash Westmoreland, who is not a conservative. “And that’s never a very interesting thing to make a film about. The thing that drives you to make a documentary is seeing it as a way to social change. Societies with little conflict tend not to make interesting art.”

And yet, lefty critiques usually follow a predictable pattern. And it actually isn't the slightest bit innovative to display rebelliousness. It's a huge Hollywood tradition, going back to the silent era. So are we really talking about creativity?

Noticing "the saggy" and the eye-rolling.

That was a rather good episode of "The Apprentice" tonight. I really appreciated the judgment of the guys from WalMart and Microsoft. Sean and Lee had an unfinished exhibit. It was missing its "roof" and that made the walls sag embarrassingly. But they had a more commercial idea for the presentation. The women's team created a more finished-looking display, but it was really a tacky living room sort of place, where kids would park themselves in the comfy chairs and keep fast-moving money-spenders from entering at all. It's easy to imagine how Sean and Lee could have been excoriated for their messy hut, but the women's team lost. The big issue for the women was the eye-rolling. It's not eye-rolling, it's eye-raising. Allie and Roxanne went into high-school mode, disrespecting Tammy at every turn of the shopping cart. And since Roxanne also made the the lame signage, it looked for sure as if Roxanne would go down. Maybe even both Roxanne and Allie. But, no, it was Tammy who got fired. She just didn't lead. Now get out of here. Go.